Servants of Allah

African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas

Sylviane Diouf

Publication Year: 1998

Despite the explosion in work on African American and religious history, little is known about Black Muslims who came to America as slaves. Most assume that what Muslim faith any Africans did bring with them was quickly absorbed into the new Christian milieu. But, surprisingly, as Sylviane Diouf shows in this new, meticulously researched volume, Islam flourished during slavery on a large scale.

Servants of Allah presents a history of African Muslim slaves, following them from Africa to the Americas. It details how, even while enslaved many Black Muslims managed to follow most of the precepts of their religion. Literate, urban, and well traveled, Black Muslims drew on their organization and the strength of their beliefs to play a major part in the most well known slave uprisings. Though Islam did not survive in the Americas in its orthodox form, its mark can be found in certain religions, traditions, and artistic creations of people of African descent.

But for all their accomplishments and contributions to the cultures of the African Diaspora, the Muslim slaves have been largely ignored. Servants of Allah is the first book to examine the role of Islam in the lives of both individual practitioners and in the American slave community as a whole, while also shedding light on the legacy of Islam in today's American and Caribbean cultures.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

For her enthusiastic support and encouragement from the
start, when it really mattered, I express my deepest gratitude to Martine
Sambe in Dakar. Heartfelt thanks to Karen Gravelle for continual support
and crucial assistance. Kessy Sambe in Paris, who helped with the
research: merci....

Introduction: An Understudied Presence and Legacy

For three hundred and fifty years, Muslim men, women, and
children, victims of the general insecurity that the Atlantic slave trade
and the politico-religious conflicts in West Africa fostered, were sold in
the New World. They were among the very first Africans to be shipped,
and among the very last. When they reached the other side of the Atlantic
Ocean, after a horrific journey...

1. African Muslims, Christian
Europeans, and the Atlantic
Slave Trade

When the first Africans were shipped to the New World, beginning
in 1501, Islam was already well established in West Africa. The religion
revealed to the Arabian trader Muhammad between 609 and 632
c.e. had been introduced to North Africa as early as 660. South of the Sahara
it had been known since the eighth century through contacts...

2. Upholding the Five Pillars of
Islam in a Hostile World

Scattered across every region of the Americas, the Muslims
entered a hostile world—a world that enslaved free Muslim men and
women; a white Christian world determined to wipe out any trace of
“paganism” or “Muhammadanism” in the newly arrived Africans.
It was essential that the new land become Christian as quickly...

3. The Muslim Community

Muslims in America during slavery strove hard to keep their
religion alive, in both the enslaved community and the larger Christian
society. But to be a Muslim was more than just respecting the Five Pillars
of Islam. It implied a distinctive lifestyle. Especially for West Africans,
with their community-based traditions, Islam is a highly communal, public,
and visible religion. It dictates and regulates the daily life, material
culture, and demeanor of the faithful...

4. Literacy:
A Distinction and a Danger

A large proportion of the Muslims arrived in the New World
already literate, reading and writing Arabic and their own languages
transcribed in the Arabic alphabet. As other Africans came from exclusively
oral cultures, and as learning to read and write was either illegal or
actively discouraged for all slaves in the Americas, literacy became one of
the most distinguishing marks of the Muslims...

5. Resistance, Revolts, and
Returns to Africa

Frugal, serious, and dedicated to hard work in order to get
their freedom or reach the upper echelons of the slave structure, the
African Muslims may have appeared, at first glance, to be “model
slaves.” These characteristics, however, represent only one facet of their
experience in the Americas, that which drew on their education and discipline
in Africa...

6. The Muslim Legacy

With a documented presence of five hundred years, Islam
was, after Catholicism, the second monotheist religion introduced into
post-Columbian America. It preceded Lutheranism, Methodism, Baptism,
Calvinism, Santeria, Candomble, and Voodoo to name a few. All
these religions are alive today and are followed by the vast majority of
the Africans’ descendants, but in the Americas and the Caribbean, not
one community currently practices...

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